Game design, game programming and more

Marketing yourself as a programmer

A number of readers asked questions about programming careers, both about getting into game-development as well as staying employed in software engineering. I started writing a comment to JM about age-discrimination but it turned into this blog post … [Continue reading]

The making of Warcraft part 1

Back before the dawn of time, which is to say when PC games were written for the DOS operating system, I got to work on a game called Warcraft. I get to lead a project! While I had developed several PC games, a couple of Mac games, and seven … [Continue reading]

Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency

TL;DR: Server-side game recording is awesome for performing scalability testing, as well as reproducing game bugs and enabling players to replay their game experiences. How to load-test game servers In anticipation of the launch of Guild Wars 2 in … [Continue reading]

Detect client disconnects using named pipes in C#

TL;DR: Solved - after several failed attempts I discovered how to detect client disconnects when using named pipes in C# -- the article below includes relevant code snippets from my CSNamedPipes GitHub project. In my spare time -- of which there's … [Continue reading]

Error handling using forever-loop

One of the biggest hassles in programming is handling error conditions. It's also one of the most important parts to get right because improperly handled errors lead to security defects and general unhappiness of your users. Error-handling code … [Continue reading]